Henry Darger Research Articles

Minor matters of major importance:1 On the vicissitudes of minor painting

This introductory editorial surveys a range of minor painting practices. It considers how minor painting might be defined, not in order to fix its designation, but to assess its implications, especially in relation to institutional authority, art’s historicity, art education and the authorial subject. There are discussions of Jim Shaw, Henry Darger, contributors to the current issue and others. These lead on to questions about art education. Rather than propose resolutions, the text instead traces the frictions between minor painting and institutional renderings of art education. The text emphasizes the ultimate inability of minor painting to escape or resist the institutional framing of painting. In reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Minor Literature book, the voice of community, rather than the individual subject, becomes important. Taking up the figure of community, the essay ends by placing the painter Norman Lewis in relation to a minor intervention within the milieu of Abstract Expressionism.

The Aura of Eccentricity: Reflections on Outsider Art Rhetoric and its Impact on a Critical Discourse

In the field of Art History, affecting art with the artist’s aura is a central mechanism of canon creation that mythologizes artists into objects of desire. This tendency permeates outsider art whose appeal is rooted in biographical exceptionalism and eccentricity rather than aesthetic aptitude (see Morgan 2018). Reviewing the work of Henry Darger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and A.G. Rizzoli—artists whose works are accumulative, some suggest compulsive, in reiteration and magnitude—this essay explores the pitfalls of projecting an aesthetic affect onto the artist and in turn building their value upon a fabricated aura of eccentricity. The aura of eccentricity resides at the nexus between material and idea. It is both real and mythologized, materially communicated through excess, opulence, and exaggeration of shapes, scale, colour, and medium yet ideologically created in the realm of differentiating adjectives and semantic flourishes. Engaging with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, this essay argues that material culture demands self-awareness of our own interpretive prejudices, in this case fashioning the artist outsider with eccentric narratives retroactively projected upon them through the interpretation of their work.

Henry Darger and the Aronburg mystery.

Henry Darger and the Aronburg mystery.

ヘンリー・ダーガー受容をめぐって(第五十六回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

ヘンリー・ダーガー受容をめぐって(第五十六回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

Henry Darger

Henry Darger

Darger's Resources by Michael Moon (review)

Reviewed by: Darger's Resources by Michael Moon Daniel Shank Cruz Michael Moon . Darger's Resources. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 151p. Michael Moon's book about pop culture influences on the work of Henry Darger (1892-1973), a janitor by day and prolific writer and visual artist by night, is an important addition to the rapidly growing field of Darger Studies. It offers a retort to the standard view of Darger (as gleaned from his work) as a pedophile and possible psychopath, which in Moon's telling is most often epitomized by John M. MacGregor's Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (2002). Instead, Darger's Resources argues that Darger's work is preoccupied with the violent aspects of American society that were also the subject matter of numerous pop culture genres throughout his creative lifetime, including religious pamphlets, comic strips, comic books, and pulp fiction. According to Moon, "if Darger and his desires seem bizarre to many people, that may be not so much because the desires are in themselves especially weird but because Darger (inadvertently or not) left an extraordinarily elaborate and extensive record of his intimate desires and fantasies" (86). Unlike much previous scholarship, Darger's Resources contextualizes Darger's work within the pop culture of his time instead of simply focusing on the work itself. More broadly, the book contends that "outsider artists" such as Darger do not work in an intellectual vacuum despite their lack of formal training, and it also implicitly places Darger's work within a queer matrix. Moon's arguments are convincing, and the book is thus a valuable one, though not without its flaws. The first chapter of Darger's Resources examines the obsession with young religious martyrs in Darger's work and shows that this fixation was shared throughout the Catholic milieu of which Darger was a part during the first half of the twentieth century. Moon discusses the many devotional books and mass-produced portraits of saints in Darger's personal library to assert that the (at times gruesome) violence toward children in his writing and painting is motivated by a fascination with martyrdom, not simply violence. Darger's work is therefore a part of the long tradition of religious art and literature rather than the self-made pornography of a lunatic. Similarly, chapter three investigates early twentieth century America's fascination with orphans, which manifested itself in a number of comic strips. As an orphan himself, Darger collected these comic strips in scrapbooks and often pasted them into his paintings or traced their figures directly onto his landscapes. Moon writes convincingly that the extreme focus on children in Darger's work is an expression of both the desire for children to be safe and the knowledge that, as in Darger's own experiences, children are often exploited rather than protected. [End Page 239] Chapter four examines two related genres which Darger read often, pulp fiction magazines and comic books. These publications help illuminate Darger's work because they also openly acknowledge the violence suffered by marginalized groups instead of attempting to ignore it for propriety's sake. The chapter focuses on the sadomasochistic elements of Darger's work, again showing that they are not unique, but were present in mass-market publications such as Weird Tales and Wonder Woman. Portrayals of Darger as sick because of these elements are therefore unfair. The major weakness of Darger's Resources is chapter two, which treats the similarities between Darger's writing and Branwell Brontë's juvenilia. While Moon successfully shows that the two bodies of work share a fascination with military battles which serves as a form of mourning for early childhood traumas in the writers' lives, he presents no evidence that Darger ever encountered work by Branwell or his sisters (in part because Branwell's work did not come into print until after Darger's death). The chapter works well as an exercise in comparative literature, and will be of interest to Brontë scholars, but it does not fit with the book's overall goal of examining Darger's "resources" to show how his work was influenced by them. Moon also compares Darger to another author...

Groundwaters: a century of art by self-taught and outsider artists

Visionary art, art brut, art of the insane, naive art, vernacular art, raw visionA what do all these and many other categories describe? An art made outside the boundaries of official culture, first recognized more than a century ago by German psychiatrists who appreciated the profound artistic expression in the work of institutionalized patients. Promoted by brilliant museum curators like Alfred Barr and artists like Jean Dubuffet, such work became a wellspring of modern and contemporary art. This volume brings together works by twelve of the most influential self-taught artists to emerge during the past century. Each represents a facet of the outsider art phenomenon, from mental patients like Adolf Wolfli and Martin Ramirez, through vernacular masters like Bill Traylor and Thornton Dial, to artists who seem to be in touch with other worlds, such as Madge Gill and Henry Darger. Related artists are featured along with each key figure, allowing a fuller picture to emerge. This book presents a narrative of the history of outsider art, clarifies predominant theoretical issues, and draws comparisons with the modernist tradition. It brings into focus the enormous contributions self-taught artists have made to our understanding of creative genius and presents them in a book that will enthral anyone interested in Outsider Art.

“Many Stirring Scenes”

Previous articleNext article No Access“Many Stirring Scenes” Henry Darger’s Reworking of American Visual CultureMary TrentMary Trent Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 26, Number 1Spring 2012 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/665630 Views: 315Total views on this site © 2012 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Otaku for Queer Theory and Media Theory

OTAKU FOR QUEER THEORY AND MEDIA THEORY Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki, translated by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 20 1 1 . Pp. 2 1 3 + xxv. $60.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.In 2004, in the initial phases of trying to write a about Henry Darger and his little-girl combatants, I was intrigued to come across an online review of a on otaku - hardcore fans of girl manga and anime - by a Japanese Lacanian in which Darger was a central figure.1 For the next several years, this one review was all I could learn about Tamaki Saito's take on Darger and otaku and the figure of the beautiful fighting girl. (The review I'd seen was entitled Attack of the Phallic Girls.) Then I heard a couple of years ago that J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson had completed a translation of the full text of Saito's and that it was in press. In his Beautiful Fighting Girl (first published in Japanese in 2000), Saito analyzes the culture and sexuality of otaku, the mostly young male participants in one of the principal thriving consumer-collectorconnoisseur subcultures that has formed around manga and anime.With the publication of the present volume, non-Japanese-speaking scholars and fans of anime and manga, as well as students of sexuality and media, can now form our own responses to Saito's account of the meaning and significance of the sexuality of otaku and of the erotic charge of the highly mediated warrior girl figures who fascinate them. As cotranslator J. Keith Vincent attests in his invaluable, extensive introduction, it is quite a baggy monster of a book (xii), comprising chapters that range in kind from psychoanalytic theory to interviews with individual otaku and analyses of the workings of temporality in anime and manga. But Vincent goes on to make a compelling case that, taken together, the parts of Saito's still have much to offer readers across a broad range of disciplines and interests, especially readers and practitioners of queer theory.Indeed, Beautiful Fighting Girl has generated as much heated debate as it has largely because of its author's insistence on putting otaku sexual desire and behavior - their strong emotional and/or erotic attachment to comics-and-cartoon depictions of cute girls in and out of battle - at the center of his analysis of otaku. Other commentators have tended to de-emphasize sexuality in their accounts. A book, published in Tokyo in 2001, in response to Saito's, by Hiroki Azuma, another prominent culture critic in Japan, has already been published in translation by the University of Minnesota Press (Otafyt: Japans Database Animals, 2009). Azuma's foregrounds political and social trauma and recurrent US cultural invasions as primary factors in explaining otaku. He also deprecates Saito's focus on otaku sexuality and his pioneering attention to the kinds of highly networked, mediated, Internet-pervaded sexualities that have only become more widespread, and more controversial, in the decade since his was first published.And yet, as Vincent points out in his introduction (xiv), sexuality, and specifically an extreme form of allegedly perverse sexuality, had been placed at the center of public debate on otaku over a decade before Saito's and Azuma's respective books first appeared. That occurred in 1989, with the arrest of twentysix-year-old Tsutomu Miyazaki, a Tokyo serial killer, for the murder and sexual molestation of four girls, aged 4-7. Before his arrest, the media had referred to Miyazaki as Little Girl Murderer, but, soon afterwards, the discovery (or planting - the debate about that appears to be unresolved) of anime as well as slasher films in his reportedly vast video collection (over five thousand titles) led to the media's rechristening him Otaku Murderer. The notion that watching too much video - too many slasher and anime films - had directly caused Miyazaki to commit his crimes gave rise to a full-blown moral panic in which the otaku subculture was exposed and demonized repeatedly as a breeding ground for deranged and violent pedophiles. …

Comics, manga, and graphic novels: a history of graphic narratives

This text examines comics, graphic novels, and manga with a broad, international scope that reveals their conceptual origins in antiquity. Graphic narrative art is a fascinating phenomenon that emerged centuries ago with the expansion of literacy and the publication industry. The earliest example of a repeating comic character dates back to the late 1700s. By following the growth of print technology in Europe and Asia, it is possible to understand how and why artists across cultures developed different strategies for telling stories with pictures. This book is much more than a history of graphic narrative across the globe. It examines broader conceptual developments that preceded the origins of comics and graphic novels; how those ideas have evolved over the last century and a half; how literacy, print technology, and developments in narrative art are interrelated; and the way graphic narratives communicate culturally significant stories. The work of artists such as William Hogarth, J. J. Grandville, Willhem Busch, Frans Masereel, Max Ernst, Saul Steinberg, Henry Darger, and Larry Gonick are discussed or depicted. Includes numerous illustrations of British satirical prints, Japanese woodblock prints, and the art of prominent illustrators Includes a chapter on the latest developments in digital comics

Henry Darger

Henry Darger

Everyday genius: self-taught art and the culture of authenticity

From Henry Darger's elaborate paintings of young girls caught in a vicious war to the sacred art of the Reverend Howard Finster, the work of outsider artists has achieved unique status in the art world. Celebrated for their lack of traditional training and their position on the fringes of society, outsider artists nonetheless participate in a traditional network of value, status, and money. After spending years immersed in the world of self-taught artists, Gary Alan Fine presents Everyday Genius, one of the most insightful and comprehensive examinations of this network and how it confers artistic value. Fine considers the differences among folk art, outsider art, and self-taught art, explaining the economics of this distinctive art market and exploring the dimensions of its artistic production and distribution. Interviewing dealers, collectors, curators, and critics and venturing into the backwoods and inner-city homes of numerous self-taught artists, Fine describes how authenticity is central to the system in which artists-often poor, elderly, members of a minority group, or mentally ill-are seen as having an unfettered form of expression highly valued in the art world. Respected dealers, he shows, have a hand in burnishing biographies of the artists, and both dealers and collectors trade in identities as much as objects. Revealing the inner workings of an elaborate and prestigious world in which money, personalities, and values affect one another, Fine speaks eloquently to both experts and general readers, and provides rare access to a world of creative invention-both by self-taught artists and by those who profit from their work. Indispensable for an understanding of this world and its workings. . . . Fine's book is not an attack on the Outsider Art phenomenon. But it is masterful in its anatomization of some of its contradictions, conflicts, pressures, and absurdities.-Eric Gibson, Washington Times

Jennie Richee (Or Eating Jalooka Fruit Before It's Ripe) (review)

Grainy film footage of a hurricane rising, precisely-traced drawings of colored botanica, sausage-like puppets that pass for internal organs strewn across a war zone—so imagined is the iconography of self-taught Chicago-based artist Henry Darger in Ridge Theater's production of Jennie Richee (or Eating Jalooka Fruit Before It's Ripe). From Bill Morrison's filmwork, documenting weather conditions (the atmospheric mundane) in their extreme, to Laurie Olinder's stunning projections on scrims that shift from opaque to transparent, and finally, to Pilar Limosner's faithfully rendered costumes, the lush visual life of Jennie Richee delivers wallop. The sheer sensory thrill of the display, deepened by Bob McGrath's multi- leveled, platform staging, is immediate and oddly invigorating, given the grim vision embedded in Darger's work.

A Larger Activity Shrouds It

Both Flow Chart and Girls on the Run, Ashbery's newest book-length poem, seek to apprehend this larger activity. And although the books weren't necessarily intended as companion pieces in name or even in form, the new poem describes a sort of Candyland version of the first?luscious and pretty and at least as theoreticaUy or inteUectually successful, though by using differ ent terms in its search and discovery. The vehicle for this poem is the posthumously-acclaimed illustrated novel by Henry Darger (1892-1972), recluse and outsider artist. Ashbery's book at once dramatizes Darger's fantasy world and uses it as an engine for the greater project, the arguably self-sufficient activity of Ashbery's poetry. The narrative recounts the adventures of a band of imaginary girls, the Vivians, who include Judy, Shuffle, and Tidbit, as they run from an immense, mysterious archetypal storm. The first section begins with Judy's exhortation to her companions to escape, her words neatly confusing the dimensions of space and time, setting the stage for the poem's work to make out of them a new sense.